In its response to our RFI, Virtela provided a detailed outline of how it would switch WAAP from frame relay to its own network. The transition would be complete in 30 to 45 days, on par with most of the proposals.
Virtela also provided impressive sample reports. VirtelaView, the vendor's secure, Web-based customer NMS (network-management system), lets customers view usage and network-performance stats, as well as monitor, provision and manage their connections from any Internet browser. Reports provide end-to-end statistics on latency, packet loss and jitter, as well as application-level reporting. Customers can see what type of traffic is moving between locations, and this data can be graphed over time for easier reading and comparison.
VirtelaView also lets customers generate and view trouble tickets, which can be organized by site, date, status, type of trouble or end resolution. The only time a customer probably wouldn't be able to generate a trouble ticket is if the local loop--the only piece of the network without backup--were down. Service changes, such as bandwidth changes, can also be made through VirtelaView. Such requests, made via the Web interface, take no more than three days to implement, assuming the increase doesn't exceed physical line capacity.
Virtela provides three CoSs (classes of service): gold, silver and bronze, each based on a combination of queuing and DSCP (DiffServ Code Point) markings. Traffic leaving the customer premises is marked with a DSCP value derived from the traffic mapping for that particular application or traffic type. Any traffic not mapped to a specific type or traffic from the public Internet is always marked as bronze service.
Virtela offered one of the best SLAs, with 70-ms round-trip latency, less than 0.1 percent packet loss and a four-hour hardware-replacement policy--pretty impressive, considering we would be utilizing our own existing hardware in-house, not equipment supplied by Virtela.
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